Berkeley Law Professor Begs Employers Not To Hire His Anti-Semitic Students
Steven Davidoff Solomon is a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley. He advises the Jewish Law Students Association.
Solomon is appalled by the demonstrations across college campuses in support of Palestine and even Hamas. He has since penned an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal asking employers to avoid hiring some of his students.
"Don’t Hire My Anti-Semitic Law Students," Solomon headlines the plea.
f if you don’t want to hire people who advocate hate and practice discrimination, don’t hire some of my students," Solomon writes. "Anti-Semitic conduct is nothing new on university campuses, including here at Berkeley."
The professor details how Berkeley’s Law Students for Justice in Palestine organized a campaign last year asking other student groups to adopt a bylaw that banned supporters of Israel from speaking at events.
The pledge requested the groups to exclude any speaker who “expressed and continued to hold views or host/sponsor/promote events in support of Zionism, the apartheid state of Israel, and the occupation of Palestine.”
Ultimately, nine student groups adopted the bylaw -- including the Middle Eastern and North African Law Students Association, the Queer Caucus, and the Women of Berkeley Law.
"Our dean—a diehard liberal—admirably condemned it but said free-speech principles tied his hands. The campus groups had the legal right to pick or exclude speakers based on their views," bemoans Solomon.
A year later, the bylaw remains. Eleven other groups have since implemented it.
“Jew-free” zones are now common across Berkeley.
Solomon asks law firms to ignore the future applications of the students who participated in the exclusion of Jews in student activity.
He requests legal employers in the recruiting process do what Winston & Strawn did last week when revoked an employment offer for a student at New York University Law School who wrote an open letter that pointedly refused to condemn Hamas’s attack.
"If a student endorses hate, dehumanization or anti-Semitism, don’t hire him. When students face consequences for their actions, they straighten up," Solomon concluded.
The dean's reference to free speech is murky.
A distinction ought to be made between expressing an unwanted political opinion -- be it on Trump, the vaccine, abortion, and race -- and celebrating terrorism, as students at Berkeley, NYU, and Harvard have.
Now, we aren't calling for employers to implement a steadfast rule à la the Berkeley professor. But we won't scoff at the US CEOs asking universities to release the names of the students who have participated in demonstrations blaming Israel for the Hamas attacks.
It's hardly hypocritical to condemn employers who discriminate against conservatives or liberals (which rarely is the case) but condone those who discriminate against sympathizers of terrorism.
American businesses should be able to tolerate Trump or Biden voters. A harder ask is to tolerate Hamas supporters.
Biden is inept. Trump is reckless. Hamas slaughters the innocent.